About Our Team
Our team has a rich history dating back to 1998, where a group of multi-disciplinary students from the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers (PSPE) first created this organization and have since created a legacy and high standard of designing, constructing, and competing with machines in the annual national competition, now known as the 2024 Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. For over 25 years this team has been able to offer fantastic opportunities for students to bond over their love for all things creative and out of the box while at the same time learning more about tool-working and how to implement many concepts in mechanics, physics, chemistry and more.
Over the years we have grown and established ourselves as a top competitor in the national competition and beyond, placing 1st in the last 2 competitions post-pandemic in 2022 and 2023, and finishing top-2 for each of the last 8 competitions dating back to 2014. On top of our success at competition, our organization has some very prestigious accomplishments including breaking the Guinness Book of World Records record for “Largest Rube Goldberg machine in competition” back in 2012 with a 300 step machine, as well as appearing on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2005, 2006 and 2015. On top of that, one of our machine’s was featured in an episode of Modern Marvels on The History Channel.
The national competition has bounced around, recently moving back to Purdue in 2019, and just this year has been taken over by co-host of the show “Contraption Masters”, current “World’s Leading Authority” in everything Rube Goldberg, and former alumni of this organization, Zach Umperovitch. This new look competition is sponsored by Purdue’s College of Engineering and is once again in partnership with the Rube Goldberg Institute! We are so excited to see how this next iteration of the annual national competition will be like and how it can continue to expand and grow the world of Rube Goldberg machines! Our continued goal is to build another incredible, complex and exciting machine to compete in the competition with as well as expand our outreach more into the educational community to share our passion for what we do.